MESNAC: Intelligent Manufacturing Making Rubber Industry Stand on a New World Height

◎ Yang Honghui

Yu Mingjin, president on duty of MESNAC, said that intelligent manufacturing has become the focus of attention in various industries. In the rubber tire industry, MESNAC is doing a deep integration of the new generation of intelligent technology and rubber tire factory, realizing the digitization and networking of all elements and the knowledge automatization of rubber production process, driving tire production with data and knowledge, and meeting tire factory’s requirements of simplifying management, reducing cost, increasing efficiency, improving quality, going green and protecting environment.

MESNAC digitizes all elements such as people, machines, materials, methods, and links through identification technology and sensor technology, and simultaneously separates the digital information of the device from the device body; processes, modularizes, encapsulates, and softwares the data through a certain knowledge model, achieving the self-adaption, self-adjusting and self-diagnosis of production factors, to provide customers with the results of self-analysis data, for customers and equipment manufacturers to improve equipment technological level.

MESNAC’s intelligent solutions include three levels: intelligent equipment, intelligent workshops and smart factories. At the level of intelligent equipment, center on improving product quality and reducing operating costs, collect key information of equipment, and achieve inter-connection and self-diagnosis adjustment between equipment digits. At the level of intelligent workshops, focus on MES and logistics equipment, realize the integration of workshop information flow and logistics, improve the networking of workshops, reduce labor costs, and add the elements of factory intelligence at the same time. At the level of smart factories, base on data and achieve the interconnection and intelligent adjustment of factory equipment. At present, MESNAC has successfully delivered two automatic smart factories and finished about 30 projects of digital workshop construction or transformation. 

Innovative Mode: Intelligent Manufacturing Experience Platform

According to the introduction by Yu Mingjin, as an advocate of intelligent manufacturing and a promoter of standards in the tire industry, MESNAC’s top priority is to provide more efficient and valuable intelligent solutions for our customers. To this end, MESNAC is determined to build a smart tire factory experience center, which is positioned as a customer experience platform, product testing platform, and technology upgrade platform.

Chairman He Ning said, the reason why MESNAC has the ability to build the Smart Factory Experience Center is that MESNAC has accumulated a great deal of experience in three aspects over the years. Firstly, MESNAC can provide 80% technological equipment for tire production. And compared to other equipment suppliers, MESNAC has the most indepth understanding of the techniques in tire industry. Secondly, over the past 20 years of practice and exploration, MESNAC has completed its knowledge reserve and product-supply capacity in seven separate technical framework layers during project delivery and product development. Thirdly, MESNAC has an extremely profound understanding of industry standards. MESNAC has led and participated in developing many industry standards.

In the MENSAC Equipment Industrial Park in Jiaozhou, Qingdao, an intelligent equipment experience production line has been built in the 260-meter-long experience center plant for tires from mixing to building, allowing visitors to truly feel the benefits and value brought by intelligent manufacturing. At the same time, VR experience link has also been set up in the experience center, enabling to experience the automatic operation mode of the entire factory from the perspective of VR, and feel the deep integration of human and machine.

Liu Feng, vice president of MESNAC, introduced that in the experience center, the equipment and production lines that can be seen are all in physical level, and behind these visible devices are the “neural systems” that connect them together and control the dynamic operation of various devices like the brain. These are the most difficult. From the perspective of management, the smart factory includes ten functions: process traceability, automatic scheduling, cost analysis, equipment interconnection, workshop bill-board, quality verification, process assurance, plan monitoring, logistics scheduling and workshop monitoring. In a real smart factory, from these ten aspects come these invisible “soft systems”.

It is understood that the experience center can apply virtual reality technology to product development link, allowing customers to fully participate in the design process, so as to quickly understand customers’ needs, quickly solve key technical problems and shorten product delivery cycle. It can prepare equipment spare parts in advance, reducing the cost of spare parts occupation of funds by RMB 2 Million Yuan per year. It can maintain the equipment in advance, shortening equipment operation time by 5%, reducing equipment failures, and extending the service life of equipment by 3%.

Yu Mingjin said that MESNAC would work with customers and strategic partners to continuously test, verify and upgrade machine vision, fault diagnosis, remote diagnosis and Prognostic and Health Management (PHM), intelligent plan management and other technologies in the experience center. In accordance with customers’ process requirements, the intelligent equipment will be iteratively upgraded centering on improving the quality of rubber products, improving production efficiency, reducing operating costs and meeting the requirements of safety and environmental protection.

Intelligent Equipment: Building Machine with Highest Daily Output Released

MESNAC has been developing the first TBR two-drum building machine since 2002. After precipitation of five generations of model, now it has manufacturing experience of more than 1,100 machines. On this basis, the MESNACTBR team has developed the TPRO-STBR single-stage three-drum intelligent building machine lasting for two years. With five core technologies, 25 technical patents and 37 technological innovations, this model is the intelligent building machine with the highest daily output among similar models in the world, 40% more efficient than traditional models. It is the TBR building machine that is initiative at home and leading abroad. Once the model was released, eight orders were received, creating a new record for new sales of MESNAC.

Wu Shoutao, general manager of MESNACTBR & OTR Building System Business Division, said that the focus of TPRO-S model was to improve tire quality. To this end, the R&D team spent a lot of time researching the tire production process as well as dynamic balance and uniformity, and designed the building machine based on a full understanding of tire production. Measured data shows that TPRO-S is expected to become a hot product in building market after ZCX3, achieving a leap-forward improvement in four aspects.

Firstly, the quality of tire is improved. TPRO-S mainly solves the problem of how to improve dynamic balance and uniformity during tire-building process, focusing on the positioning accuracy of each semi-finished part in tire production and how the tire maintains roundness during building process. The tire-making process has achieved accurate conveying, precise fitting, good jointing, accurate delivery and compact rolling press to ensure the quality of each tire. Compared with the previous generation of model, the mean quality of dynamic balance is improved by 20%, and that of uniformity is increased by 15%.

Secondly, the reliability of equipment is improved, and maintenance is not required for half a year. Combined with past manufacturing practices, MESNAC has output 174 enterprise standards for ten major fields of building machine, covering R&D basic specifications, model selection, processing, installation and commissioning. For a bolt, its size, use conditions, anti-loose measures, tightening torque and marking, etc. all have standards to follow, to achieve standardization and refinement. Improve product quality and reliability from every detail, so that the equipment maintenance period is extended to more than half a year, and the longest single maintenance time is less than six hours.

Thirdly, the production efficiency is improved. Through the analysis of each step of tire-building process, using the time axis-based motion control principle, the machine action and manual operation time are decomposed and optimized, so that a single three-drum building machine has a cycling time of less than 150 seconds. At the same time, through the application of intelligent tooling, the problem of multi-standard and small-volume production in tire factory is solved practically, which greatly reduces the time for replacing tire specifications. For the same specification, it needs two people and 20 minutes to replace, and for different specifications, it needs four people and 40 minutes to replace, greatly improving the overall production efficiency of tire factory.

Fourthly, the operating costs are greatly reduced, and equipment procurement costs can be reduced by 30%. As part of the future smart factory, TPRO-S has full consideration for factory operations. Compared with old models, under the circumstances of the same number of equipments, the production efficiency of TPRO-S has increased by more than 30%. At the same time, the number of operators has been reduced, and the labor cost has been reduced. The annual benefit (benefit of capacity improvement + benefit of labor cost reduction) created by single equipment exceeds RMB 3 Million Yuan. If the planned annual production capacity is 2-million-unit TBR, the required quantity of TPRO-S model will be reduced by more than 30% compared to traditional models.

Wu Shoutao also said that MESNAC not only provides TPRO-S building machine, but also has the ability to provide an overall solution for intelligent building workshop, which mainly composed of overall solution, capacity planning, centralized control center, automatic logistics, manufacturing execution system and cloud platform. Taking the cost structure of intelligent building workshop as an example, Wu Shoutao analyzed the economic benefits brought by production capacity improvement and labor cost reduction of tire enterprises, and explained that after comprehensive considerations from the aspects of tire quality, equipment reliability, production efficiency and investment income, TPRO-S building machine will become the first choice for tire enterprises.

Intelligent Workshop: Open the Era of Intelligent Mixing

Difficult recruitment, strict environmental supervision, high cost and unstable quality are the problems faced by many rubber enterprises, especially mixing workshops. Wang Jianjun, general manager of MESNAC Intelligent Mixing Business Division, said that the mixing workshops of many factories were currently low in automation, and the production was still in semi-automatic or even manual state. The lack of effective data management and health management, low standardization and low modularity resulted in high maintenance costs and long maintenance cycle. MESNAC has been promoting the automation and modularization of mixing workshop since 2000, and now has realized the intelligent mixing system.

Core technologies of the overall solution of MESNAC Intelligent Mixing Workshop include saving manpower, improving quality, protecting environment, reducing cost and increasing efficiency. In terms of saving manpower, it adopts automatic bagging for small materials, bag making, sealing, automatic unpacking, power-assisting rubber moving, automatic rubber turning, automatic feeding for small materials and automatic storage for rubber sheets. In terms of improving quality, it involves material prevention, material blending, high-precision weighing, one-time rubber mixing, quality control and quality traceability. In terms of protecting environment, it adopts combustion method, biological method, chemical washing, activated carbon, etc. to meet environmental requirements. In terms of reducing cost and increasing efficiency, it can save feeding time and predict failure.

Wang Jianjun introduced that MESNAC Intelligent Mixing Workshop can reduce three people in automatic bagging and sealing; can realize automatic unpacking and robot power-assisting rubber moving, reducing the labor intensity of workers and saving six people for rubber transportation; can automatically turning rubber sheets, saving nine mixing mill operators; can automatically feed small materials and achieve unmanned turnover, reducing human error; can automatically store rubber sheets and output them as required, realizing unmanned turnover of rubber sheets and reducing floor space by 60%. In terms of improving quality, every object has a mark and barcode/RFID management is used throughout the process, achieving zero error; material mixing makes tires more uniform; low-temperature one-time rubber mixing can increase production capacity by more than one time; the weighing accuracy of burdening reaches ±2‰; quality control and analysis can be realized in real time, responding quickly; and the traceability of full process is up to 100%.

Smart Factory: Aiming at Making a Good Tire

The core feature of MESNAC Smart Tire Factory is knowledge-centered, data-driven, which is mainly reflected in the links between equipment and equipment, man and machine, equipment and materials and production and market supply chain.

Guan Bingzheng, vice president of MESNAC explained the 7-level architecture of the Smart Factory, including process equipment, intelligent control, human-machine interface, automatic logistics, workshop informatization, enterprise informatization and cloud. The process equipment, intelligent control and human-machine interface seen in the production line belong only to the level of intelligent equipment. On this basis, the development of automatic logistics and workshop informatization can create an intelligent workshop. Enterprise informatization and cloud are further developed, and a smart factory is finally built.

The principles of the smart factory include the optimization of unified norms, stability and reliability, human-machine coordination, automatic intelligence and overall costs. Its foundations of management are quality, modularity and standards, and technological foundations are IoT and service networking. Informatization, logistics automation and intelligent control technology are comprehensively applied, realizing the tire factory CPS in which all the elements of tire production are digitized. Through innovative intelligent products, methods and processes, tire enterprises can “make a good tire”.

Guan Bingzhen also took a production plant with annual production capacity of 2-million-unit TBR as an example and elaborated the actual changes that intelligent manufacturing brings to tire enterprises. Firstly, reduce labor. Through intelligent operation assistance, significantly reduce the difficulty of operation and management and improve operational efficiency; through the application of mixed reality technology, provide visualized solutions to equipment problems and greatly reduce personnel training costs. Secondly, improve efficiency. Through artificial-intelligent production scheduling, continuous production can be achieved, reducing the inefficient production time by more than 5%, and increasing the output of single equipment by more than 3%. Thirdly, improve quality. Through the quality correlation analysis, on the basis of big data sorting and analysis, conduct correlation algorithm analysis of production, process, raw materials and other factors which can affect the quality, and get the most critical factors that affect product quality. Fourthly, reduce costs. Through artificial-intelligent staggering peak production scheduling, energy saving effect is very impressive. Fifthly, control inventory. Through equipment failure prediction and health management, eliminate blind procurement of spare parts, reducing spare parts occupation of funds by RMB 15 Million Yuan per year, and according to equipment degradation, maintain the equipment in advance, extending equipment life by 15%.

Guan Bingzhen finally concluded that in the future, MESNAC will continue to optimize solutions to bring more value to tire factories, and use intelligent manufacturing to make the rubber industry stand on a new world height.